“American Sniper” Takes Apart the Myth of the American Warrior

Here is a one-sentence review of "American Sniper": the martial virtues are so precious, rare, and fragile that they should be sent into combat only with the greatest caution.

Clint Eastwood's new film is political in the highest sense of the word. He dramatizes the use and abuse of state power in the light of great philosophical ideas. These ideas illuminate the drama not as if from afar but from within; they aren't imposed on the drama but arise spontaneously from Eastwood’s contemplation of people and events—and they find echoes throughout his career.

"American Sniper" is a movie of violent action—but its action is surrounded by a terrible stillness. Its story of war contains valor and horror—the destructive and self-destructive conflicts that are intrinsic to a person endowed with a warrior's noble nature. As such, it's a cinematic tragedy in the deepest and most classical sense of the term. Eastwood considers recent events with a fierce anger even as he considers the universal span of human experience with an Olympian ruefulness.

Alongside the angelic figure at the center of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood,” whose Texas youth is unshadowed by wild impulses or unruly thoughts, there's another Texan, whose altogether more complex and troubled tale is told by Eastwood in "American Sniper," which could as aptly be called "Manhood." Eastwood's movie is centered on the true story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL whose lethal marksmanship, put to action in the Iraq War, was unprecedented. (The movie is based on Kyle's 2012 memoir; Nicholas Schmidle wrote about Kyle in the magazine last year. For the sake of clarity, I'll call Eastwood's character Chris.)

"American Sniper" starts with military action, with Chris stretched out on a roof in Fallujah, gazing at the streets through a rifle sight at a young boy preparing to launch an explosive device (handed to him by a woman, presumably his mother) against an approaching Marine convoy. But, when the movie cuts to a flashback, to Chris's childhood hunting lesson with his father, during which he shoots a deer, it turns into a truncated and telescoped cinematic Bildungsroman, telling the story of Chris's boyhood as a sort of founding myth: how an American boy grows up to become a singularly effective soldier.

It's a family story that starts with Chris's father teaching him to hunt and discovering the boy's natural gift for marksmanship. Chris is a sort of Mozart of the rifle, but it takes a particular and peculiar confluence of circumstances for him to marshal his talent for something more than sport. From the earliest age, Chris is cast in the role of protector—he defends his younger brother, Jeff, from a bully in the schoolyard—and Chris's father sets up the scenario in a dinner-table anecdote that plays out like country Plato, saying that there are three kinds of people, wolves (predators), sheep (victims), and sheepdogs (protecting sheep against wolves).

The metaphor finds its echo in Plato’s "Republic," in which Socrates explicitly likens society's "guardians," with their penchant both for ferocity and for patriotism, to dogs. In Plato's dialogue, the "guardians" are put through a rigorous philosophical training, not least on the assumption that they will also be the rulers of an ideally just society. Chris doesn't have a philosophical training; he has Christian faith, a sense of family, and, above all, a fund of life experience—albeit one that arises from a very particular tradition.

There's a moment, early in the film, in which Eastwood cues, in a glance, the impending tragedy: a very brief shot of Chris, seen through a doorway, heading to rodeo grounds, which borrows from the final shot of John Ford's "The Searchers." It's just a touch, but it's a brilliant one—Eastwood marks Chris, from the start, with his coming isolation. Even in the young man's easy days of sporting adventure, his character bears the seed of the awesome price that he'll pay for his distinction, but it's a distinction that arises from the enduring spirit of the Western, translated into modernity—for better and worse.

The latter-day cowboy has no frontier and no range. Chris comes to realize that, for all his aptitude, he's a cardboard cowboy living his life for show—for a kind of show biz that's low in substance. Chris's sense of self is undermined by his girlfriend's infidelity (a key moment that binds his sense of purpose with his sense of masculinity), and his inchoate sense of higher purpose is aroused by the 1998 attacks against American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. For Chris, America isn't just a homeland and a sense of self; it's an idea, and Eastwood dramatizes the mounting nightmare of a man of unique talent who is increasingly possessed by that idea.

"American Sniper" is the story of a genius in crisis; it's a movie like Eastwood's "Bird," in which Charlie Parker's singular talent comes with a self-destructive streak. Chris undergoes a singularly demanding training to become a SEAL. It's physically severe and emotionally brutal, and Chris submits to it unquestioningly and endures its rigors triumphantly—until he gets to the shooting range. There his genius rises to the surface, in a scene that has explicitly to do with vision—he dares to contradict his marksmanship instructor's order and proves that he sees more, and better, than his instructor does. For Eastwood, the military makes a man—which war then destroys.

Chris is both fiercely protective of his comrades-in-arms and furious at what he sees as "evil"; he sees his mission as both necessary and just—and that very fact renders it all the more painful. He personally doesn't have doubts about his mission, even though he finds others—including his brother Jeff, also serving in Iraq—who do. That sense of righteousness drives Chris deeper into division against himself—the more certain he may be of the justice of his fight, the more ardently he takes the fight to the enemy, despite his keen sense of pain at dealing death and his keen awareness that, the more aggressively he pursues his mission and defends his colleagues, the greater will be the sacrifice demanded of them, the greater the likelihood that they'll be wounded or killed.

Eastwood greatly admires, even reveres, the warrior, even as he hates war—not on principle, not because it's intrinsically wrong but because it's intrinsically destructive to warriors, to American warriors. He comes off as righteously angry at politicians who sent Chris into Iraq—not least for feeding him a false story about the national interest, which Chris swallows completely and which ratchets up his furious sense of protecting the American homeland from threats originating in Iraq. Eastwood depicts commanding officers who are out of touch with events on the ground (one is fixated on the use of "contractors," another is leading the "counterinsurgency" by the book, and another calls Chris onto the carpet for shooting an insurgent), and has a sly contempt for international institutions as well (as seen in several snide sidebars regarding a place in the Olympics for the insurgents' deadliest sniper).

But Eastwood doesn't fill the movie with the details of practical politics; he sets up Chris's fighting with a mighty, intensely focussed abstraction. The lies behind the rush to war are never explored explicitly, nor is the war in Afghanistan or any debate regarding America's general strategies against Al Qaeda. There's no reference to the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, to debates over the Iraq War, or to any explicit policy discussions at all. Yet the movie doesn't convey a sense of a whitewash. Rather, Eastwood reduces Chris's situation to its most elemental and shows that, even under optimal circumstances, with completely dedicated and professional fighting forces operating under political premises that they believe in—even if the Iraq War were to pass moral muster as a just war and political muster as a necessary one—it would be equally destructive to the soldiers who wage it. And the fact that this war doesn't pass either test is, for Eastwood, a political damnation of the very first order.

For Chris, it feels great to shoot and terrible to kill, great to protect one's own and awful to do what's needed to protect one's own. His quickly mounting count of confirmed kills gets him nicknamed "the Legend," and he hates it, because he knows that he's being acclaimed for doing something that he knows to be both holy and sinful, too sacred for desecration in vulgar slogans and too horrific to be celebrated. From the very start of Eastwood's directorial career ("Play Misty for Me"), the conflict between public image and private identity is a morally decisive fault line, and the demagogue, who doesn't just have an incidental public image but takes pride in it and seeks to derive advantage from it, is a singular villain. A Bible carrier more than a Bible reader, Chris senses that he's defending the faith by violating its fundamental tenets, and that he's being celebrated for the worst part of his service—and, even more, that the celebration of warriors reveals the ignorance of the unbearable truth of battle. Even as he becomes one of American society's heroes, Chris becomes, in his own mind, a pariah, unfit for society.

At the same time, the tormented Chris, returning home between tours of duty, deems society unfit for the likes of him. The very comforts and pleasures to which a family man aspires now strike him as unseemly. The obliviousness of a society that enjoys those pleasures while its most valiant members are fighting a horrific war far away strikes him as a desecration of the sacrifices of those fighters. In the name of their valor, war itself becomes a sort of white whale, a goal pursued furiously and monomaniacally, for its own sake, without regard to purpose or consequence.

On the occasion of the John Huston retrospective at Film Society of Lincoln Center, I revisited his documentary "Let There Be Light," about Second World War veterans—all young men—who were suffering from mental illness as a result of their combat experience. The most moving element for me in Huston's film is one patient's account of a visit from an acquaintance: "He says, 'Before I come out here to see you, my first impression was like in Bellevue, the fellows from the last war that are completely maniacs.’ " The shocking remark twists the proverb that generals are always prepared to fight the last war: each war results in disorders of which the next war is a symptom. Each war loses a generation; one era's maniac is, in Huston's time, suffering from a "psychoneurotic" disorder. Now, returning veterans are diagnosed with P.T.S.D. For Eastwood, they're all enduring the same ailment—war is hell—and those who are in a position to send soldiers into war had better understand that diagnosis.

Eastwood includes in the cast of "American Sniper" soldiers who have been grievously wounded in combat, soldiers who have lost limbs, whose surviving limbs have been mutilated, soldiers in wheelchairs, who perform alongside the movie's star, Bradley Cooper. It's casting akin to that of Harold Russell, a Second World War veteran who lost his hands in combat and was fitted with prosthetic hands, in William Wyler's 1946 masterwork "The Best Years of Our Lives." There, Russell—who had never acted in a movie—is one of the three stars, alongside Dana Andrews and Fredric March. In the course of that drama, it's not Russell's character but the former fighter pilot played by Andrews who is most conspicuously suffering from the emotional traumas of combat.

Yet the movie that "American Sniper" most brought to mind was the 2004 documentary, "Oh! Uomo," by the Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. They present archival footage of the First World War—including images of veterans who were disfigured in combat. The movie includes battlefield footage and images of survivors (military and civilian), as well as the primordial rumblings of the Second World War and Fascist Italy's war in Ethiopia in the mid-nineteen-thirties. The documentarians draw a line from one derangement to another, and so does Eastwood: the wreckage of another generation in the last decade of warfare may well be not chastening but maddening, may terrifyingly bear the seeds of more self-destructive violence.

"American Sniper" is an angrily cautionary film, and its anger reflects back to its very title. What's distinctively American about Eastwood's sniper? He's an accidental warrior, the product of experience—of family and intimate principle, not of a military academy or a hereditary warrior class. Chris knocked about for a while before entering military service; he's not a callow adolescent volunteer or an unwilling draftee but an adult who brings a formed sensibility to his service—making him both uniquely gifted in the field and uniquely tormented by his actions there.

The film's one strange omission involves gender; there are no women soldiers featured in it, but Eastwood strongly genders Chris's idea of the warrior, as in a passing moment when he tells his young son to "look after our women"—Chris's wife and their infant daughter. Especially given the sexual humiliation at the origin of Chris's military vocation, I'd like to see how Chris's encounters with women in the armed forces inflect his ideas about who needs to be looked after.

Eastwood's drama isn't about the effects of a misguided American military adventure on Iraq but about the effects on America—on the United States's ability to defend itself when the country's principal defenders are laid waste in a needless war. Eastwood’s film, without expressly challenging so-called American values, raises the question of the abuse of those values in a system that lets armchair warriors send real ones to destruction in vain. He's not diagnostic—he doesn't rise to the issue of whether democracy or its perversion is at fault. Whatever American distinctiveness the title may suggest, there's one thing from which Americans aren't excepted: war is as devastating for them as for anyone, which makes the notion of political and moral exceptionalism all the more potentially self-destructive. "American Sniper" isn't just a tragedy; it's an American tragedy, a vision of American destiny as tragic. Far from patriotic pomp, it's a vision that sees past the still eye of the American self-image to the whirlwind.